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The Net Delusion: The Dark Side Of Internet Freedom by Evegeny Morosov, published in 2011, goes into detail about the ways in which governments around the world monitor and control the flow of information online. When you look into the screen, you truly don't know what or whom you're dealing with----a good bit of the time. That's why online conversations are not going to save the world. Another reason online conversations aren't going to save the world is the obvious one: if they haven't yet (because they're going on all the time) it probably isn't going to happen, period.
At the same time, without the Net, there's a lot of information that couldn't otherwise be found, or shared. But how do you sift that information? How do you figure out what's really going on?
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When you can't see who's on the other side of the screen, things can become very confusing.
Net writer Tony Muga, aka Hatrick Penry, is very concerned about the lack of news coverage on the documents released under the Freedom of Information Act by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission regarding the Fukushima meltdown. He wrote this article about why the alternative media isn't exactly what it might seem.
Muga might have run into something like the following.
Source: Stephen DeVoy
The Security Culture Script
Imagine the power that COINTELPRO could exert if it were to promote an activist as an expert in security culture! Such an activist would become a valued authority on who should be taken seriously by the activist community.
If such an activist were working for the state, he or she could prevent more effective activists from being trusted while promoting less effective activists or, even worse, infiltrators. This is the case within the Boston anarchist community, and it is likely that it is the case elsewhere.
Witness Operation Mockingbird.
Going back in time a bit for some context.
After leaving The Washington Post in 1977, Carl Bernstein spent six months looking at the relationship of the CIA and the press during the Cold War years. His 25,000-word cover story, published in Rolling Stone on October 20, 1977, is reprinted here.
The Church Committee is the common term referring to the United States Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, a U.S. Senate committee chaired by Senator Frank Church (D-ID) in 1975. A precursor to the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, the committee investigated intelligence gathering for illegality by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) after certain activities had been revealed by the Watergate affair.
COINTELPRO is an acronym for "counterintelligence program."
COINTELPRO is the FBI acronym for a series of covert action programs directed against domestic groups. In these programs, the Bureau went beyond the collection of intelligence to secret action defined to "disrupt" and "neutralize" target groups and individuals. The techniques were adopted wholesale from wartime counterintelligence, and ranged from the trivial (mailing reprints of Reader's Digest articles to college administrators) to the degrading (sending anonymous poison-pen letters intended to break up marriages) and the dangerous (encouraging gang warfare and falsely labeling members of a violent group as police informers).
Now what about 9/11?
Bill Christison, a former senior analyst for the Central Intelligence Agency, became convinced that 9/11 was not all it seemed. He wrote an article in 2006 titled "Stop Belittling The Theories About 9/11."
Ted Gundersen, former FBI Chief in Los Angeles, also said 9/11 was a false flag attack.
This video makes it clear that something's not right. For many years I thought people who said it was an "inside job" were pure nutjobs. But more and more people, who are obviously not nutjobs, are questioning what happened. The experts in this video have never gotten a response to their queries.
If you're in an important position in the world, you better not question 9/11. That's for us little people to fume about in our cubicles and cages.
And most folks don't believe us, so we're no threat.
I still "SMH" thinking about the jurors I tried to engage in conversation about Building 7, in March 2010. I tried to explain it as a controversy, an unexplained problem with 9/11, involving a steel-framed skyscraper that fell down in 6.6 seconds on 9/11 at 5:20 pm. These were both otherwise intelligent people, but both were skeptical, and one asked me if I believed astronauts landed on the moon. (I didn't talk to her for the rest of the trial. Who needs it.) They explained to me that if such a thing really had happened, it would be on the news. It would be too big a secret for so many people to keep. I tried to explain to them that news channels and press is owned by a small number of corporations, but they weren't buying it. They told me that news organizations work to scoop each other and a scoop would be money. Everyone loves money, no corporation would pass it up!! So, if there were anything to this "so-called" Building 7 controversy, it would have come out.
When I responded that there was lots of videotape and newsreel from that day, much of which has been posted all over YouTube, they still didn't believe me. They thought I had fallen victim to an insidious "Internet Rumor" of the sort that distracts paranoids and tinfoil-hatters, and those who don't feel important enough in their lives and need a little excitement--need to know stuff other people don't know.
"That stuff can be faked," they told me.
I then told them that I remembered clearly when Building 7 fell down that day, and watched it unfold live on the news, because I was in the control room at the radio station in Santa Monica, anchoring and engineering live coverage all afternoon that day.
They said they'd look it up, but never said another word about it.
And so it goes.
I mean, I wasn't there, in NYC. And, who knows? Maybe everything I've seen on a screen, to date, is nothing more than pixelated hallucination.
I studied communications in college. I've continued to study communications (and work in the field) since then. I grew up with an obsession to learn the truth about things, because during dinner table conversations, the issues were serious. One thing my father instilled in us was a drive to debate the nature of reality and human interaction. The problem was that he was King, Godlike, All Knowing, and we didn't know jack. If he didn't agree with our opinions, he would tell us that his opinion was more informed, because he was an adult and had been out in the big world for much, much longer.
And, of course, we couldn't argue with this. At a certain point I stopped arguing with him, but my sister, a straight-A student and no dummy when it comes to retaining information, never did. And so, growing up in Camp Burkey ("This is Not a Democracy. I Am In Charge Here) contributed to a sort of obsessive quest for knowledge. Not isolated facts, not the jumble of information that shoots out of the TV or radio--but context, the big picture. And that's hard to get.
But the longer one listens, and listens, one does start to hear. The world speaks---the entire world communicates. Humans communicate; the planet itself communicates.
Even when things are quiet, there are a million different kinds of quiet, and a million conscious and unconscious ways of listening. I have learned some of them.
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